Excellent discussion, I get the points you are making about creating your own prices, looking for the value and making your wagers on that basis. And it is clear that you have a deep understanding of the statistics that you focus on.

I read and think, how can I get to that level of understanding about even two variables? Do I need some software? Do you write your own? Does it take loads of your time? Do you have to do loads of manual input or do you have automatic feeds?

In other words how can someone like me, with about 1 hour a day available get to some decent level of knowledge.

It is clear to me reading your posts that I , read some pundits, have a bit of a think and take my position, I am painfully short of any meaningful analysis on which to base my judgements ( re my last post).

The one a day competition has helped me understand that fewer bets well thought through, is better that 4 or 5 half though through.

But the key point is my own data is non existent. Any tips on how to get a little bit better, bearing in mind that I have 1 hour a day and limited sptead sheet skills.

I agree crofty that many are in the same position as you time wise. We are all guilty of trying to pack too much into this time.

If there is an area you are most interested in why not drill down into that one area and become an expert on that subject. So it could be goals, or bookings, looking at underdogs, anything really, and building and recording or finding stats on that one area.

You gain from learning about this and can then impart that knowledge to others, then test it out on the forum or forum blogs or tipping comp.

I have loads of spreadsheets and systems but have 2 that i turn to much more than others for my betting.

Good advice, Nors, to try and specialise. For the very reason you state, Crofty, time constraints. Bookmakers have to spread themselves thinly, and one thing I have noticed with regard to price discrepancies, favourable ones usually pop up in the lower leagues.

On probability, here is a really simplistic version. If you take the last 8 matches played for each team. Home form for home team, away form for the away team.

You can choose how you want to calculate probability. By that, I mean which games you use. The entire league results, just homes / aways, just recent form ( how far back ), band top 5/10/15/20 for difficulty? The downside is it's not an exacting science, but if it identifies differences in the market and accurately predicts winners, you have your edge. That's the goal.

You then have to look at the odds on offer to see how the bookmakers view it, to see if there is a difference.

This suggests that the idea of 8 match form, home and away isn't that far removed from the bookmakers method. It also suggests that Charlton are being offered a fraction higher. That said, they still only have a 43% chance of winning, which is worse than the toss of a coin. This should tell you to leave well alone.
You're looking for better than 50% chance at the very least. And then you want there to be value in the odds being offered.

Mathsbet has taken these ideas further, to factor in goals scored for and against. A lot of the sums are the same, if you want to work out how many goals a team scores or concedes on average over the 8 games. Marry them up with their opponents and divide by the number of games to determine a simple starting point for analysis.
Then further still, to factor in shots and shots on target. I like this idea, because it's football without keepers. That is, just how reliant is a team on their keeper, for one? But how effective are teams at creating opportunity ( on average )?
There are fine margins in football, a lot of randomness and luck.

I don't use any software, just a notebook. Given your hour a day, you could easily do one or two leagues a day. Once you get in to a groove, it's a quick procedure to determine a short list of possibles. Rather than working out lots of repetitive % on the calculator ( because they are often repeated ), create a chart for quick reference.
For example, if you cast your eye back up top, you can work out the percentage chance of something for 1 out of 16, 2 out of 16 etc and note them all down. Then you can just glance at your percentages.

When I have finished scribbling, I note previous scores this season, and highlight teams that score 2 or more goals on average, teams that don't score a whole goal on average, teams that concede 2 or more, teams that don't concede a whole goal on average ( Win 2 Nil possibilities ), teams that have a greater than 50% chance of winning ( preferably at home ), teams that have a greater than 70% chance of getting 'something' from the game ( DrawNoBet or DoubleChance options )

Periodically, it's probably wise to test the higher % predictions to see how good they are at finding winners.
If my chosen criteria are not measuring up, I'd keep recording them ( just in case it was a small sample blip ), but start to work with a different variation to see if you can improve it.

It's worth doing the work, I feel. Might get paid for it one day?

Football research with serious intent, but not without a sense of humour. Share in my good fortune or, at the very least, have a laugh at my expense!

Thinking about this some more. Just how accurate is the bookmakers method for calculating probability? That might be a good blog entry for somebody.

I pose this question because out of all the midweek fixtures so far, the bookmakers have calculated that 8 teams had a better than 50% chance of winning.
Of those, only 3 won their games. And SIX of them were playing at home! On the plus side, only ONE lost. Perhaps a reliable method for predicting DrawNoBet or DoubleChance on those that look to be value.

Obviously you would want to work with a much bigger sample. But the question remains - just how accurate is the current thinking with regard to probability and how to assess it? And the biggest question of all - is football just too random to be accurately assessed this way?

Football research with serious intent, but not without a sense of humour. Share in my good fortune or, at the very least, have a laugh at my expense!

I don't use software either, and most of my work is done in simple text files. That said, it takes up a lot more than an hour a day on average. It takes up almost as much of my time as my actual work, but that is to cover all of the major European leagues, and you could probably scale it down based on the time available to you.

In terms of how you find an edge, that will depend on your own style. Some people are extremely good at analysing teams and games from watching teams and getting to know them and their strengths and weaknesses, whereas I could watch a game and see almost nothing of value, whereas the numbers make sense to me.

To expand on what Inquisitorem has said, I find that a critical element to the two systems I've designed that have shown a profit (from dozens of systems that ended in the bin) is to get the relative weighting right, which is to say, to quantify the value of a goal, or a win, or a shot or whatever metric you're measuring.

In other words, since we know that it is easier to score or to win against the bottom placed team in any given league, our system of measurement should take account of this.

The other thing that I would suggest if you are designing a system, even a simple one, would be to treat every team as two teams - a home side and an away side. You can factor some values across from one to the other if you like, but I prefer to keep them completely separate. This helps to highlight some stark value, such as Burnley at 2/1 against Leicester, even though the former are the third best home side in the league, and the latter are the second worst away side in the league.

Whatever tools you design to highlight team's relative strengths and weaknesses is just to assist you in setting prices, because there's no point in having a system that predicts winners if you're taking negative value bets where the odds are too short.

When you have your own prices, which should be set without reference to the market, you can then compare the prices you have framed against the prices available on the market. You are likely to find that your prices are broadly the same as the market in a large number of games, but there will be some games where there is a disparity; often that will be because the side which is too short is famous or likely to be well-backed, as I've gone into before.

From this list of value bets, I would then investigate further in terms of checking the team's form, league position, head to head record, etc, to see if there are obvious reasons for the apparent odds anomaly. Because I use systems based on goals and shots on target, it can sometimes recommend bets on teams that are on long losing streaks, for example, and those are games which can then be filtered out.

Having said all of this, I should also emphasise that it is only in the past year that I have been making consistent profit from football and previous to that, I lost quite a bit road testing various systems. In terms of time vs money, I have been very poorly rewarded for the thousands of hours I have put into it, so I wouldn't exactly recommend it as a lifestyle choice. Instead of doing something interesting with my Friday night, I am waiting for a German Bundesliga 2 game to get underway so I can lay the 0-0 when the odds are right. It doesn't get much more exciting than that!

Not 1 of mine but i have seen quite a lot of punters fall foul of the Scorecast, just because it offers big prices, but punters don't realise you have to get a double up to win your bet, picking a player to score first or the correct score is hard enough.

On Wednesday 1st February, whilst playing pool, 3 of the players from the other team all backed Jonjo Shelvey to open the scoring for Newcastle against QPR, but non of them had a single, they all opted for £5 scorecasts, and they each had Shelvey to score first and 3-1, 2-0 & 2-1 then whinged a bit at the end of the match.

I told them that they simply have to have a bet (even small stakes) on 1st goal and score, even just to try and double your initial stake, just incase you got 1 right, they all said, that's something they had never thought about, they just noticed the bigger price on offer and plumped for that.

With regard to the post about scorecasts just above ,leaving aside the fact that I find it amusing that someone would tell 3 guys who are annoyed about losing the same bet what they should have done -not something I'd risk and also the fact that because I'm not familair with this form of betting and as a result could not quite understand what point was being made in the last sentence,I wouldn't be so hasty to say this bet was a mistake.

I say that on the basis that most bets on soccer are placed for entertainment purposes and they certainly got their monies worth. They could also of course have easily bet on the 2-2 at especially with say 5 minutes to go if they knew they were going to be that bothered if the bet failed.